User blog:Zandrae/Contests and Archiving Continues
Contests As we approach being all nice and cleaned up, one of the goals is to populate the Wiki with new and current information. One way we can do that is to encourage returning and new players to make character profiles. One thing we also need is some model articles to go in our guidelines. We also want to start featuring articles of users from time to time. Guideline Character Profiles We'd like to have 2-3 character profiles that we link to from our guidelines documents, particularly, we want to showcase pages made by people who aren't the admin but regular users. Why not use admin profiles? The administration/mods are generally not here to promote ourselves or toot our own horns. So let's promote you, because this wiki is all about, you. We are looking for individuals who have made pages to our guidelines that are exceptional model pages. I'd like to offer a small reward for those pages. Part of the reward is what likely amounts to a huge number of people seeing your stuff, but offering 1000g for each of the winners, Horde or Alliance on WRA is also on the table. This would be a limited time contest. *'Article must conform to guidelines, including copyright guidelines' - You may only use art you made, paid for (and properly credited), or screenshots. (We'd be happy to help with image crediting.) *'Articles should be complete with no red links' - You can always put links in later when making additional pages for other characters, but, we don't want to confuse new users. *'Articles shouldn't feel overwhelming' - Some of you guys have these amazingly super detailed profiles with sections and subsections and verbose histories and it's great but we want new users reading through the guidelines to feel comfortable with posting articles without feeling like they've got to match that level of detail. *'Article must have link to battle.net profile' so we know who to send gold to and can check to see when you last logged in to make sure you're still playing. *You may nominate your own character. *You may nominate another person's character. *To nominate you must have been a member of the wiki for 2 weeks and made at least 20 edits. *You may not have been subject to disciplinary action in the past. *You must play on WRA. *A guideline/explanation on how we judge the profiles will be published ahead of time so people know exactly what we're looking for. (This will be a highly technical analysis more than an actual content quality analysis, though we may shy away from profiles that make large implications on the rest of the community because we don't want to give people the idea that the wiki is a place to try and make and enforce server canon because it's not.) The evaluations will be kept private but can be provided upon request. Top contestants may be voted on somehow, maybe, but, the method of voting will have to be one that assures no duplicate votes. Featured Articles Featured Articles, ideally, will be a little less restrictive. *This is an ongoing contest and will likely run quite a while, there are no entry dates and no deadline dates. *You may not nominate yourself. *Reward will be between 2500-5000g. This will depend on how often we choose to feature an article, twice monthly or once monthly. *Admin and Moderators may be nominated but not by other admin/moderators. *No user can win more than once in a six month period unless there are absolutely no other eligible nominees. We want to showcase a variety of people not just one person's characters. *People who are nominated and pass the technical guidelines will remain on the nominee list for a very long time until they are either featured or become inactive in game (haven't logged in for over one month). If they've been featured in the last six months they'll be on a "nominated but standby" list until all other candidates run out or their six months are up. Critiques Welcome Considering making a pretty note box people can put on their article's talk pages saying they are open to critiques and coming up with some critique guidelines. Archiving Continues We continue to move articles that have not been touched since 2012 over to the Archive namespace. Unfortunately we cannot make the random link feature not link to those pages, so we may have to go in later and clean up ones that are particularly visually disruptive. It is possible that we may consider removing some of the oldest pages, but, we may wait until other work is complete so we may give people a chance to pull profiles from the archive. You may tag a page that is yours that is inactive with a Cleanup template ("Cleanup" in double curly brackets on both sides) and put a note on the talk page that it can be archived and we'll move it. If you'd prefer it get deleted, tag it with double curly bracket Delete and we can do that, too. Only the original poster of the article can request this, though special cases may be considered (if someone else made the article for you originally). Guild/Group Templates We have a guild infobox but we don't really have a boiler plate. I'm trying to think of information that might be necessary for a guild article that we want all pages to have and encourage that. Please throw suggestions at me. We want to know about. For Non-RP guilds, we want to know loot systems, stuff like that. For all guilds we want to know rules. We want to know recruitment procedures and contacts or site information. For RP guilds we want to know stories, rp styles, etc. Category:Blog posts